Almost 25 years ago, Florida State University Professor Sonia Cabell faced a challenging moment early in her teaching career in Oklahoma.
As a second-grade teacher, she encountered a student who had trouble with reading and was unable to retain much information. The issue persisted despite the student advancing in grades, leading to an increasing gap over time.
The inability to address that issue in 2001 made Cabell eager to learn more. She earned her master’s degree in reading education in 2003 and her doctorate in 2009.
Cabell’s pursuit of the highest education in reading and literacy was meant to solve the question that she kept asking:
“How do we actually help students read, especially those with difficulties?”
Through her studies and experience as a professor, she learned the answer lies among many solutions. But one constant is that conversation is key at an early age. Cabell believes that developing children’s oral language even just after birth is vital to their literacy success.
“I think it’s critical to reach kids early,” Cabell added. “What I learned from my doctoral work was the importance of the earliest years to our development of the language comprehension, the oral language skills we need, the knowledge that we build and knowledge about the world around us that we’re building right from birth. It sets a foundation for later reading success.”
As the R. Keith and Patricia Duggins Sigmon Endowed Professor at FSU, Cabell has become one of the nation’s most recognized reading education and literacy experts.
She co-authored the book “Strive-For-Five Conversations: A Framework That Gets Kids Talking to Accelerate Their Language Comprehension and Literacy,” specializing in early childhood language and literacy instruction.
In an interview with CBC News in Canada, Cabell said she believes that “screens prohibit the conversations that we want parents and children to have,” raising awareness that heavy reliance on technology needs to have its limits for literacy goals.
The early years for children are important for language development. The visual that kids have of adults speaking to them and reading their lips is critical for their brains.
“Conversations are how we learn language,” Cabell said. “Just think about from the earliest point in time as we interact with young children – even babies – we’re having things called protoconversations where we’re going back and forth with them. And we might repeat their babble and they might do an action. And then we will say something.”
Cabell says these types of protoconversations – known as early, pre-verbal interactions between infants and caregivers – are necessary for development. As children begin to talk, adults can respond in ways that allow children to receive language models from more experienced users.
“It’s through those multitude of interactions that start at birth and then continue onward that we’re learning language around us as children are growing older,” Cabell said. “At 3 or 4 years old, they might say something like, ‘I winned the game,’ and I might say, ‘Oh, you won the game.’”
Cabell’s advice to combat screen time with children in their early years, birth to 8 years old, is for parents to do more interactive read-alouds with their kids. Reading a book can open doors for conversations before, during and after the book.
“Research shows that not only is book reading powerful, but all the interactions you’re having around it are powerful to improve outcomes like children’s vocabulary and their knowledge about what you’re reading,” Cabell said.
“Research shows that not only is book reading powerful, but all the interactions you’re having around it are powerful to improve outcomes like children’s vocabulary and their knowledge about what you’re reading.”
– Sonia Cabell, R. Keith and Patricia Duggins Sigmon Endowed Professor
Engaging in read-alouds also addresses the important difference children must know between the sophisticated written language of a book and casual conversations.
“Introducing them to written language through read-alouds is important,” Cabell added. “Written language is really different from the oral language that you and I speak every day. That’s casual conversation, because we write very differently than we speak. We write with more sophisticated vocabulary, more complex sentence structures. And that’s the kind of language, the academic kind, that children will have to unpack themselves once they are able to read the words.”
With dual appointments in the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) and the Anne Spencer Daves College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, Cabell’s workload is heavy. Her research focuses on how teachers can integrate oral language and content area (i.e., science, social studies) instruction together in the earliest grades, including pre-kindergarten through second grade.
The potential outcomes of what she is studying could have a big effect on enhancing children’s literacy levels. She is working to address how environments rich with content can help impact kids and their language learning – better understanding how content area instruction can leverage oral language to improve reading outcomes.
“Integrating language and knowledge together can potentially change the language learning environment for students,” Cabell said.
Through her years of studying and research, Cabell has identified how crucial oral language is to allowing children to decode words, going beyond just reading words but actually understanding what they mean. It’s another area that promotes better reading comprehension.
“I think about how right from the beginning we need to make sure that we’re helping children learn vocabulary, to learning ideas, to talking about these things so that you can give them all they need to be successful readers,” Cabell said.
Cabell came to FSU in 2017 as an assistant professor, thankful for the university’s support in her industry-leading research. Her time at the FCRR, a world-renowned reading research center, has allowed her to work with other interdisciplinary professions in education, psychology and speech therapy to address the common goal of raising reading levels.
“We’re trying to really understand how reading works from multiple perspectives,” Cabell said of her work with the FCRR. “Not only how reading works, but how can we better teach reading? I have felt so honored to be a part of this group and the research that has come through the Florida Center for Reading Research.”
As a young second-grade teacher in Oklahoma, Cabell turned a difficult moment into a path forward. Her dedication to her students has led to advancing reading research, positioning FSU as a national leader in this field.